Celebrating Self-Government

Every Fourth of July, Americans celebrate with fireworks and barbeques and John Philip Sousa. Then we return to our regularly scheduled lives.

But this Independence Day is different. Last week, the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, an unprecedented expansion of government’s power into one-sixth of the economy and a tremendous loss to individual liberty. Now more than ever, we need to embrace our nation’s First Principles and remember what it takes to be self-governing citizens.

Typically, that brings to mind the basics of political participation: voting, signing petitions, serving on a jury, and complaining to your congressman. These activities are important, but they aren’t the whole story. The Founders understood self-government in a twofold sense: political self-government—by which we govern ourselves as a political community—and moral self-government, according to which each individual is responsible for governing himself.

The Founders relied on four virtues to sustain individual self-government.

Self-reliance: Forged through hard work, it prevents citizens from depending on the state.

Responsibility: Independent citizens understand the limits of government and solve problems for themselves.

Moderation: Reasonable citizens control their impulses and respect the rights of others, the constitutional process, and the rule of law.

But this understanding of self-governing citizens has been supplanted by a new version of the modern ideal citizen. Recently, Americans met Julia, the faceless cartoon woman starring in an online ad for the Obama campaign. She’s the modern American girl whose success in life can be chalked up to the helping hand of government.

She gets a federally subsidized education, college loans, free birth control, free prenatal care (when she “decides to have a child”—no father is mentioned), a small business loan, and retirement security because of the ever-present and ever-President Obama. Her success apparently has nothing to do with her own initiative, talent, or hard work. It’s attributed to government programs, there to bless and subsidize every activity of life. The idea of self-government, which is at heart of the Declaration of Independence, has been replaced.

Experts aren’t just “helping” with life-changing issues such as education and health care. There’s also a slate of bureaucrats to cover the mundane activities of life: picking light bulbs, deciding credit card terms, and figuring out how much cola it’s safe to consume.

This isn’t what our forefathers fought for.

To name one: Levi Preston was in his early 20s when he fought in the Battle of Concord, the beginning of the American Revolution. Years later, he was asked why he fought.

Preston responded that it wasn’t the tax on tea. “I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.” It wasn’t the burdensome Stamp Act. “I never saw any stamps.” Nor was it John Locke’s inspiring book. “We read only the Bible, the catechism, Watt’s Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanack.”

Well, what was it? “What we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”

On this Fourth of July, let’s remember our principles and celebrate our self-government. Then, the rest of the year, let’s do our best to live them out.

Join The Discussion

Julia–that was quite good. Especially since I have been tracking the organized attempt to use a social and emotional learning emphasis as the dominant reform in Common Core for K-12 and Lumina's DQP, Diploma Qualifications Profile, for higher ed. To remake students' values, beliefs, habits, and emotional responses so they will cease to be the self-governing citizens the Declaration envisaged.

Would you believe the radical reimagining of the purpose of education to transform individual citizens at a fundamental level is so acute that the National Science Foundation refers to people as sociotechnical systems that need to be changed for a Sustainability economy?

Obamacare is only the beginning of the intrusions into any meaningful concept of personal liberty and autonomy. In fact, the very concept of the individual as distinct from social relations and conduct is under attack.

We have quite a battle on our hands on so many fronts on this Independence Day.

That was a very well written article and one that gets to the truth about what is happening in our Country. The only thing now is to get enough people together in order to establish a Federal Government that adheres to our principles. To many people today really do not care about freedom and liberty. These people will give up everything that America stands for just as long as they keep getting free stuff. It is a sad state of affairs. I blame the education system of secular liberal democrats and the main stream media for the stupidity of the American citizen today.

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